Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  “The coffee is shit,” Cura muttered, and considering the stench coming off the so-called road, Tam wondered if the Inkwitch wasn’t being literal.

  Tam heard someone yelp behind them. She looked back in time to see Clay Cooper shove the grille-faced priest into a pool of yellow-brown water.

  Moog laughed. Ginny scowled. Slowhand shrugged and nudged his mount onward.

  Rose stopped walking and wheeled on them. “We didn’t come here to drink,” she said. Heartbreaker stamped a hoof in the mud and swished his bright red tail. “Brune, I want you to scour the fighting pits. Try to convince whoever’s handy it’s worth their time to join us.” She tossed the shaman a clinking sack. “Bribe them if you need to.”

  “I’ll need to,” he assured her. “Wait, join us? Does that mean we’re really doing this? Going up against the Frost Mother? I’m down for it, obviously, I just … I thought you said the Dragoneater was our last gig.”

  “That was before Astra used us to do her dirty work,” Rose told him. “Before she … made it personal.”

  Brune nodded, his eyes flitting to Freecloud and back. “Fair enough.”

  Rose said to Cura, “Do you remember where Sinkwell is?”

  The Inkwitch grinned. “Does a drunk know her way to the bar?”

  “Find me alchemists, stormers, summoners—whoever you can scrounge up. Promise them enough reagents to last a lifetime, but if that fails—”

  “Punch them until they come around?” said Cura.

  “Exactly. Uncle Moog—”

  “Say no more!” The wizard sidled up next to Cura. “I shall accompany the young lady to Sinkwell. I’ve got a few old friends hiding out there. And an enemy or two, I’d imagine. Ah, but we’ll have the boys along to discourage violence.” He motioned to the massive owlbears shuffling along behind him. Passersby gave Gregor and Dane a wide berth and even wider stares.

  Rose looked to Clay as the old merc dismounted and stretched a kink out of his back. “Can you convince the Agrians and Carteans to stick around?”

  Slowhand looked imploringly at his wife. “Can I?”

  Ginny’s expression was grim. Her jaw bunched like she was chewing through a stone, but she nodded.

  Clay shrugged. “I’ll try. Gabe usually did the talking, though.”

  “I know,” said Rose. “Thank you.” Tam wasn’t sure whether she was thanking Slowhand for trying or his wife for allowing him to do so.

  Branigan was chatting amiably with Lady Jain, and now the two of them looked to Rose. “What can we do?” her uncle asked.

  Rose eyed the colourfully clad Silk Arrows as she considered her answer. “I don’t know how long it will take Astra to get that Horde up and moving, but it’s a good bet she’ll be here within the next few days. We can’t have her turning our dead against us. Cemeteries, family tombs, mass graves—everything needs to be dug up and burned.”

  “Great.” Bran looked decidedly unenthused. “Sounds fun.”

  “And what’ll you be doing while we’re diggin’ up the dead?” Jain asked.

  “Freecloud and I are taking Wren someplace safe.”

  “To Grandpa’s house?” the girl asked. Rose nodded, and the sylf tugged on her father’s cloak. “Can Tam come with us? Please, Daddy?”

  “Of course,” said the druin, “if she wants to.”

  Wren’s face brightened. “She wants to! Don’t you, Tam?”

  The bard squinted at the ruin of Contha’s keep, looming stark against the glare of the setting sun. “You bet I do.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  The Forest of Broken Things

  They waited until nightfall to approach the fortress. The snow receded as they went up, giving way to bare stone and sparse yellow grass. Once, when her footing slipped on a patch of shale, Tam put a hand down to catch herself.

  “It’s warm,” she marvelled at the stone beneath her fingers.

  “It’ll cool soon,” said Freecloud. He was carrying Wren in the crook of one arm. The sylf was fast asleep and drooling on her father’s shoulder. “The spire traps sunlight during the day, refracts it through a sequence of lenses, and focuses it into a beam hot enough to melt duramantium.”

  “Really?” she asked. “Is that how—”

  “Less talking, more walking.” Rose’s voice lashed at their heels like a wrangler’s whip.

  “You’ll see what I mean,” murmured Freecloud.

  They went the rest of the way in silence, but for the scuff of boot on stone and the labouring wheeze of Tam’s breath as they neared the summit. She used Duchess as a crutch, leaning heavily on the unstrung ashwood bow. Neither Freecloud nor Rose (burdened by a sleeping child and a suit of plate armour, respectively) appeared wearied by the climb.

  “This way.” The druin led them through the ring of ruined arches circling the citadel’s base, then down a worn stairwell into a darkness so complete Tam couldn’t make out her hand when she waved it in front of her face.

  Tam heard someone rifling their pockets, then a gently blown breath, before a soft light picked out the hard planes of Rose’s face. She was holding a spiny pink seashell—the source of the illumination—which grew brighter when she blew into it a second time.

  The bard chuckled. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a shell collector.”

  Rose examined the artifact in her hand. “I used to be. Uncle Moog gave me this when I was about Wren’s age. He claimed to have found it on the beach near Askatar, and told me there’s a fire sprite living inside.”

  The bard sniffed. “How does it actually work?”

  “When it comes to Moog’s magic,” Rose told her, “sometimes it’s better not to ask.”

  They proceeded underground, their footsteps echoing as they followed the druin down a gently sloping passage. There were no time-ravaged furnishings inside the citadel, no faded tapestries decorating the walls. There weren’t even rooms—only a long, curving corridor that went on and on. The light of Rose’s shell gleamed from sheer black stone overhead and underfoot. The air grew warmer, and soon Tam’s shirt was clinging to the small of her back.

  “We’re here,” said Freecloud eventually. “Watch your step.”

  The hallway opened onto an empty black void. A ray of light hung like a silver thread in the darkness. Tam saw a cloud of bats wing through it, dancing like dust motes in the slender beam.

  She looked over at Freecloud. “It doesn’t burn them?”

  “It’s only starlight,” he replied. “During the day it would reduce them to ash in an instant. It turns this whole place into an oven.”

  Rose stepped as close as she dared to the edge of the chasm. “So how do we get down?”

  The druin produced the moonstone coin he was always fiddling with. He stepped to the wall and inserted it into a small recess, then pressed it with a finger and turned it counterclockwise. The air to Tam’s left shimmered like spilled lamp oil. By the time she turned to look, the void and its string of starlight had vanished, replaced by an enormous hall.

  What she first mistook for buttressing pillars were in fact huge metal golems carved to resemble figures encased in plate armour, each of which rested their hands on the pommel of an upturned warhammer. Their eyes were dull green spirals within the shadows of sculpted helms. There was a throne shaped like a tipping basin at the far end of the hall, backdropped by the starlight column.

  “Hmm.” Freecloud turned the coin again, clockwise this time. The throne room rippled like a stone-struck pond and became some kind of foundry instead. The starlight shaft was directly before them now, shining down into a gigantic bowl of faceted black stone. Six moulding stations surrounded the bowl, each attended by constructs that moved with the deliberate efficiency of a waterwheel or a windmill—machines designed for a simple, singular purpose.

  “Seriously?” Rose sounded incredulous. “Your father has his own Threshold?”

  The druin didn’t quite smirk, but he didn’t not smirk either. “Who do you think made them in the f
irst place?” he said, before retrieving the coin and stepping through.

  Rose followed, and Tam brought up the rear. She tried not to think about the fact that, were it not for some trick of druin sorcery, she’d be stepping over a sheer drop that would leave her plenty of time to perfect her panicked scream before she hit the ground. She was so intent on blanking her thoughts that she didn’t see the sentinel standing next to her until Freecloud addressed it.

  “Orbison! Hello!”

  The golem was tall and wiry, made of something that looked like copper. Pipes coiled around his limbs, feeding into a single tube that ran up his chest and into his chin, giving the construct a stiff, almost erudite posture. His head reminded Tam of a teapot, since a small tube jutted like a horn from the front. The latticed squares that served him as eyes pulsed a vibrant green upon seeing Freecloud, but where his mouth should have been was a smear of corroded iron stamped with studded bolts. In lieu of answering, he waved instead.

  “Orbison, what happened to you? Your mouth …” The druin’s ears sagged. “Did my father do this?”

  The construct, of course, said nothing, but a puff of steam and a short whistle came from the spout on his forehead. His eyes flared again, and with a long-fingered hand he pointed at the sylf sleeping in Freecloud’s arms.

  “This is my daughter. Our daughter,” he said, no doubt warned by the prescience that Rose had been about to correct him. “Her name is Wren.”

  The girl stirred at the sound of her name. Her eyes fluttered open. “Am I dreaming?” she murmured.

  Another puff escaped Orbison’s spout as he admired her, along with a whistle perceptively softer than the first.

  “Wren, this is Orbison. He was my friend when I was little. He’ll be your friend now, too.”

  “Hi, Orbison,” she said groggily. Her eyes drooped shut. She smacked her lips a few times and fell back asleep on her father’s shoulder.

  Freecloud made quiet introductions of Rose and Tam. The golem whistled cheerily at Tam, while the one he reserved for Rose sounded decidedly lewd.

  “Okay, okay.” The druin laughed. “Easy there, pal.” His eyes strayed again to the golem’s mangled mouth, and his smile trickled away. “Is my father in the workshop?”

  Orbison nodded, pointing toward a corridor behind him.

  “Take us to him. Please.”

  “My father was miserable for years after the Dominion fell,” Freecloud said as they followed the construct deeper into Lamneth. Orbison had thrown open a hatch on his chest, bathing the way ahead in ghostly green light. “He’d been dragged into a war he didn’t believe in, betrayed by his allies, and forced to watch as his precious army was smashed to rubble.”

  “Who betrayed him?” Tam asked.

  “According to him? Everyone. The Exarchs were attacking one another, each trying to claim the biggest piece of the pie. My father only wished for order. He wanted the Dominion restored and Vespian returned to power.”

  “He didn’t care that the Archon was killing his own kind to resurrect his wife?” Rose asked.

  “All he cares about are his machines.” The bard detected a trace of bitterness in Freecloud’s voice. “The constructs, the Thresholds, the tidal engines—”

  “Contha made the tidal engines, too?”

  “He did,” said the druin. “Anyhow, when war broke out he tried to act as a mediator, to make the Exarchs see the folly in fighting among themselves, but diplomacy failed, and he was forced to put his golems in the field.”

  “How did that work out for him?” Tam asked.

  “Great, at first. He wiped out the Horde of Arioch and drove Coramant’s legions back into the Heartwyld. Eventually, he was summoned by the southern Exarchs to treat for peace at what remained of Kaladar.”

  “Obviously a trap,” Rose said.

  “Obviously,” Freecloud agreed. “But my father, though brilliant, was ever a slave to hubris. He believed his army was indestructible, and it’s possible—though he would never admit it—that he hoped to become Archon himself. In any event, he was ambushed, his army utterly destroyed. He returned to Lamneth and sealed himself inside, then languished in darkness for the better part of two centuries, while the Dominion burned and the Hordes overran Grandual. He built nothing, did nothing—except curse those who’d brought the empire to ruin. I grew up alone, with nothing but constructs for company.”

  A whistle chirped up ahead of them.

  “And Orbison, of course,” he amended. “Then one day a bird—a finch, I think it was—found its way into the citadel. My father, for whatever reason, became fascinated with it, and eventually he went back to work and made a simulacrum of it.”

  Tam blew a stray hair from her eyes. “A simawhat?”

  “A replica,” Freecloud explained. “A tiny, metal bird. Except it couldn’t fly. So my father killed the finch. He pulled it apart to see how it worked, and then he made one that did fly.”

  The bard winced. “Brutal.”

  “Indeed.” The druin sighed. “He started sending me to gather specimens. Foxes, snakes, insects—anything he could dissect and replicate. He even had me hunting monsters. And then, eventually …” Freecloud fell silent.

  Rose, frowning in the light of her magicked shell, glanced over. “Eventually …?”

  “He asked me to bring him a human.”

  Rose stopped walking. Her frown exchanged places with a full-blown scowl. “Tell me you refused.”

  “I refused,” he assured her. Their daughter rubbed at one eye and muttered something in her sleep. “Of course I did.”

  “And you want to leave our daughter with him? I thought you said—”

  “She’ll be safe here. Safer than she will be with us. Unless we stay here with her.” He was probing, Tam gleaned, hoping to find weakness in the armour of Rose’s newfound resolve to defend the city above against Astra’s Horde. When she didn’t bother to reply, he went on. “Wren has nothing to fear from my father, I promise. He’s not a monster.”

  Rose chewed on that like a rabid dog who’d been tossed a pork chop as a peace offering. “There are worse things in the world than monsters,” she said, before turning and stalking off after their guide.

  They turned a corner, descended a broad, curving stair, and traversed a bridge bordered on each side by waterfalls so sheer as to resemble panes of glass. Orbison traced an arc in one with a finger as they crossed, whistling quietly to himself. Before long they arrived at a pair of huge doors, half ajar. The construct rapped twice on one of them and waited.

  They waited for so long that Tam was about to suggest the golem try knocking again when a reedy voice called out from within. “Enter.”

  The chamber beyond was (unsurprisingly) huge. Like the rest of Lamneth, it seemed designed to accommodate the stature of Contha’s massive constructs. It was dark but for thousands of glowing green runes that gleamed in the dark like the script of an invisible book. By their light Tam could see that the ceiling above was thick with looping vines. Roots clawed like fingers through fissures in the walls, which were mottled grey rock instead of the glassy black stone from which the rest of the citadel was carved. The floor under their boots was snarled with snaking boughs, piled here and there with leafy outcroppings. Crooked white columns jutted from the growth underfoot, sprouting twisted limbs that reached to strangle one another, forming arches that dripped with scarlet creepers.

  “Caddabra.” Freecloud’s voice was muted by reverence, or fear, or something between the two. “The Upside-Down Forest.”

  Tam blinked in the gloom. “Caddabra?”

  “Its heart lies somewhere to the west, but it grows by the year, spreading like roots through the deep places of the world.”

  “I thought Caddabra was—”

  “A fairy tale?” The druin’s voice was wry. “Like the Dragoneater, perhaps?”

  “Well … yeah.”

  Freecloud’s ears skewed to one side. “Few have cause to enter the forest, and few that do manage
to find their way out again.”

  “Did you come to tell stories to children?” snapped a voice from somewhere ahead. “Or perhaps to confess why you’ve been gone for most of a decade on an errand that should have taken months? Orbison, bring them—or I’ll have your arms off and you can knock with your head next time.”

  The golem whistled sullenly and set out through the upended trees. As they went after him, the runes populating the gloom began to shift, bounding from the path, or floating through the dark like so many fireflies. Tam gasped, but Rose gave voice to her astonishment before the bard found the breath to speak.

  “Eyes,” she uttered. “Cloud, what are these things?”

  “Constructs,” he whispered. “Replicas of the specimens I used to gather.”

  Tam’s eyes were adjusting to the gloom. She saw what looked like a wrought-iron raccoon skulking along a bough near her feet. Its neck was skewed sideways, a seam of green light visible where its head didn’t quite fit its body. A pair of squirrels leapt from their path. One of them, she noted, had a corkscrew tail and hovered for a moment each time it left the ground. Elsewhere, a steel-plated bear lay on its side, unable to rise. Its legs were mangled stumps that looked to have been crushed by its own bulk. Emerald light spilled from its open mouth, but no sound at all, since it hadn’t been granted the means by which to roar.

  She saw numerous other animals lurking among Caddabra’s inverted eaves: a deer with tusks, a snake that slithered in circles. Every creature was misshapen in some way, some more than others. Many were hybrids, part of one creature spliced with part of another, and none of them quite as they should be.

  They’re experiments, she grasped. Botched replicas of whatever their maker had on hand. She wondered what happened to those he’d perfected—or if he’d perfected any at all.

  There was a turtle whose neck was as long as her leg, and a snub-tailed mountain cat with two heads. Birds flocked among the foliage as well. Tam spotted a pink-bellied thrush with glass wings like that of a dragonfly, and a trio of ravens hanging from a branch on segmented silver tails.